Saturday, July 23, 2011

Process Explorer – a Sysinternals tool - is an alternative to Windows task manager that offers a wide range of functions ideal for PC monitoring and troubleshooting. Version 15, which has now been released, includes the ability to track GPU usage over time.

GPU usage can be viewed from the View > System Information tool. It is also possible to view GPU usage against all running processes. To see this information, click View > Select Columns and from the Process GPU tab check the boxes next to whatever you'd like to watch: GPU Usage, GPU Private Data, GPU Committed Bytes, or GPU Shared Bytes.

In the image above, you can see the GPU usage by the process ‘Desktop Window Manager’ which is responsible for drawing the desktop on the screen.

Version 15 also includes a new option to restart a service quickly. But this is only possible for services running under svchost.exe, for instance, DHCP, print spooler, RPC, event log etc. To do that, double-click on a svchost.exe instance, click the Service tab, choose the offending service and click Restart, and Process Explorer will stop and start it for you.

Process Explorer version 15 also has a smaller memory footprint and visually cleaner performance graphs.